The Stepford Wives Essay - Critical Essays

Reviewers who complained that Ira Levin had not delved deeply into technological fine points with his Stepford automatons, including the implications of cybernetics, may have overlooked his real intentions with this novel. In The Boys from Brazil (1976), which was made into a successful 1978 film starring Gregory Peck and Sir Laurence Olivier, Levin explores the more plausible field of genetic cloning. That novel is more than twice the length of The Stepford Wives, however, which is essentially a fast-paced novel of intrigue that includes a wry critique of the women’s liberation movement even as it assails the patriarchy.

Levin prefaces the novel with a passage from Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), in which she describes women’s endeavor to escape from a patriarchal “prison”; however, “it is with bad grace that the man lets her go.” The origins of The Stepford Wives may lie in Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House (1879) and Hedda Gabler (1890), both of which concern the plight of women incarcerated in male-dominated society. Nora Helmer succeeds in escaping her possessive and domineering husband before he can turn her into a “Stepford wife,” but the cost is high. The daughter of a general, Hedda Gabler attempts to deal with the patriarchy on its own terms, through power and manipulation, but she fails and is driven to suicide.

Levin does not create for Joanna...

(The entire section is 482 words.)

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